Tuesday, November 12, 2013

Years and years
from now I can tell my granddaughters that I stood on the deck of Chicago’s Leading Lady with a freezing
wind blowing out of the north as I directed 40 or so tourists to look at what
is, as of today, the second tallest tower in the nation, standing proud and
muscular, despite its 40 years of age, against a clear blue Chicago sky.

It was at 10:00
this morning that the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat announced
that the 408 feet of whatever-it-is atop the new One World Trade Center in New York City is really a spire and not an antenna. That decision meant, of course, that the New
York tower’s 1,776 feet inhales more than 300 more feet of air than Chicago’s
tower.

Congratulations on the tall building thing (JWB Photo)

So New York has the
tallest building in the country and Chicago . . . well . . . Chicago is now the
second city when it comes to super-talls.

You know what,
though? I’ll take Willis Tower over One
World Trade any day, and I especially favor it on a day like today when the
clarity of its plan stands so emphatically against the bright afternoon
sky. It defines this city in a way that
the New York tower never had a chance at doing. Part of the reason for that
lies in the difference between the two cities.

Bruce Graham, the
lead architect on Sears Tower, said this in his oral history at the Art
Institute of Chicago, “Chicago is a city of skyscrapers. New York is not. New York is a city that is a huge rock that
has been carved out to make streets . . . You have to be miles away to see the
buildings . . . You have no sense of the buildings. Rockefeller Center was the first one that you
could see, and after that there were really none.”

A tall building that makes a statement and defines a city (JWB Photo)

Mr. Graham hit upon
one of the problems with the new building in New York. It is a giant among other giants. It is impossible to find a space nearby where
one can appreciate its presence apart from all of the other towers that
surround it. And it doesn’t help that
one-fourth of the tower’s height is made up of what we have apparently agreed
to call a spire.

There’s more to it
than that, though.

Consider what Paul
Gapp, the Pulitzer prize winning architectural critic for The Chicago Tribune, wrote when Sears Tower opened its doors in
1974 . . .

Sears Tower clearly and exultantly asserts
itself as a giant whose elements assume a lighter character as they rise, in a
manner somewhat akin to that of the skyscrapers built in the 1920’s. There is no self-effacement here, no bland
anonymity. And that is as it should be .
. . So Graham and Khan [Fazler Khan, the structural engineer on the project]
have triumphed in coping with bigness, as far as that difficult game can be
carried. [Chicago Tribune, February 3, 1974]

The key phrase in
Mr. Gapp’s appraisal? No bland anonymity.

You can call it a spire if you like . . . maybeit's that pointy thing at the top thatseals the deal (JWB Photo)

One World Trade Center
is a good looking building, intriguing in its clever geometric tricks. Beginning at the twentieth floor, the sides
of the building are chamfered, slanting inward from the square base from which
they rise, in the process forming eight elongated isosceles triangles that
resolve themselves at the square top of the building. It’s nice to look at. But does it stir the soul and inspire a city
the way that Willis does?

Noted architectural
critic Paul Goldberger said this as the new tower began to rise in 2010:

I think a great tower would have had a place
there. Either a pure tower, just as a
symbol, like the Eiffel Tower of the twenty-first century, we might say. Or remembering that the United States is,
after all, the birthplace of the skyscraper – a building form that we’ve now
given to the world that is so common all around the world – what better place,
if we’re looking to show the world that in fact we have not been defeated by this
attack, than to come back to this place, in this country, in this time and
build the most advanced skyscraper we could possible imagine. The one that will bring the art of skyscraper
design forward yet again . . . And instead we are not doing that. We’re doing a building that is not that
different from a lot of commercial buildings built everywhere, and in fact, not
as good as many of them. It’s going to
be very tall, it’ll have a little more flair to it than the old Twin Towers
did, but, you know, it’s not what it might have been. [BIgThink, September 7,
2010]

Look at those words
and then look back to the words of Bruce John Graham at the time Sears Tower
opened. Mr. Graham stated, “Art – and
certainly architecture – is more in the nature of discovery than creation. God created order, which man discovers and
uses. How it is used is a reflection of
civilization.”

Sears Tower, now
the second tallest building in this great country, reflects a civilization that
dreamed big and built boldly. As I stood
before One World Trade Center in early October, I wasn’t convinced that the civilization
that produced it shares those ideals.

Impressive from any direction, from any angle, from any decade (JWB Photo)